So Two "Top Editors" Have Resigned from Gawker, In Protest of "Interference" From the "Business Side" of the Entrerprise

This piece is hosted on an archive site, so Gawker doesn't get any traffic from it.

Nick Denton published an extraordinary claim on his site Kinja (no link):

I’m sorry also that Jordan Sargent, reporting this story impeccably despite a personal drama, was exposed to such traumatizing hatred online, just for doing his job.

Gawker is apologizing for exposing Jordan Sargent to "traumatizing hatred online"?

Isn't exposing random people to traumatizing hatred online their entire business model?

Don't forget: The Justine Sacco incident was contrived by a Gawker writer at ValleyWag, a vertical which seeks to dump hatred on random people in Silicon Valley.

If you don't know about the Gawker meltdown, you can read my piece about it from Friday night. It's got a hell of a headline, if I do say so myself.

This is like watching a game between two teams you despise: You're rooting for injuries.

Oh, and Michael Wollf wrote that in a recent conversation with Gawker's head Nick Denton, Nick Denton took a cavalier attitude towards gratuitous nastiness.

Denton immediately emailed me [after a completely gratuitous attack on Wolff's "noncombatant" pregnant girlfriend] and, in our exchange, apologized for the Gawker coverage about my girlfriend and forthcoming baby: "That description of Victoria was mean and pointless." Then he added: "I do wish there was a better way to address insults without storing up resentment ... I would love to institutionalize and automate some right of response. Even the most insolent of Gawker bloggers is better and more reasonable in an exchange."

Again, there is this odd after-the-fact, hands-off, extremely passive sort of contrition. And then the weird, "I would love to institutionalize and automate some right of response." Huh?

His point seemed to be that there was in fact no oversight, and no responsibility, prompting questions about whether Denton is able to exercise oversight, or has in effect relinquished most responsibility. Last fall, he acknowledged something like this, saying he was pulling back and assigning greater oversight powers to a management committee.

No oversight = a damaging admission which will be used in the Hulk Hogan lawsuit.

Also, Wolff goes on to note, bitterly but deservedly, that Gawker writers will have a hard time getting jobs at other places.

Milo Yiannopoulos collected all the people who should sue Gawker.

The strongest case would appear to be James Franco's -- because a former Gawker writer admitted on Twitter (before deleting it) that he made up a "baseless" claim that Franco was guilty of a violent gay rape, and he did so because he "felt like" doing it -- and so did his boss. (He did not specify which "boss" he meant.)

posted by Ace at 03:33 PM

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